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The iPhone is one of the biggest commercial successes of all time. The product has changed the way many people live. Even those with Samsung or other smart devices benefit from the innovations of the iPhone.When the first iPhone was introduced, Apple’s legendary CEO Steve Jobs informed analysts that the company’s goal was to capture 1% to 2% of the worldwide cell phone market over the next year. Ten years later, Apple has sold an estimated 1 billion iPhones and has 20% to 40% of the market.The iPhone has always been sold at a premium price and high prices ...Read More

Once again, we are on the hunt for cheap stocks. This week, we focused on stocks under $5. The reason we like cheap stocks is because these are the ones that have been proven to be most likely to deliver large gains.One study looked at how low priced, or cheap, stocks performed relative to more expensive stocks. The study found that cheap stocks delivered more than six times the average return of the more expensive stocks in a typical quarter.That study defined cheap stocks as those priced below $5. We began with that as our starting point for this ...Read More

Some investors seem to spend most of their time deciding what to buy. They should probably be spending an equal amount of time thinking about when they will sell. This might be uncomfortable because some investors associate selling with being wrong.The idea of selling losers is well known in stock trading. There is the famous saying of “let winners run and cut losses quickly.” This idea is sometimes applied only to the initial purchase.Many investors are familiar with the idea of a “stop loss” which is a sell order that kicks in when the price falls by a predetermined amount ...Read More

We are at the beginning of the last month of the year. Every single month we have provided real time buy recommendations for a successful trading strategy.Each month, we provide a list of stocks that have historically delivered gains for the next month. It’s time for us to update on this strategy.We are following one of the simplest seasonal trades possible. Few traders follow seasonal strategies although these strategies are often profitable. They are also relatively low risk because they limit market exposure to short periods of time.To apply this strategy, every month we are running a scan to find ...Read More

In the summer of 2015, the stock market pulled back. The decline that accompanies that pullback would end in February 2016 after a 14% decline in the S&P 500. Since that time,the index has moved nearly straight up without a pullback. In this article, we look at whether or not that is unusual.Or, more specifically, we look at how unusual this winning streak has been and what the implications for the future price action are.To begin with, we need to define some terms:We are defining a pullback as a decline of at least 5% from a prior high but no ...Read More

The end of year tends to be a seasonally strong period for stocks. Some analysts believe the January effect has moved into the end of year with stocks doing better in the final weeks of the year as traders try to arbitrage the January effect.Arbitrage is a trading strategy where investors buy an undervalued asset they believe has a high probability of rising. For example, it could be the stock of a company that is being bought by another company. The deal might be for $100 a share but the stock trades at $99, giving the arbitrage trader a riskless ...Read More

Building an online trading system can be a complex process. It can require customized programming, access to expensive data sources and extensive time commitments to maintain the system. However, there are a number of web sites that do the heavy lifting for free.Web sites offer something for traders with any level of programming skill. If traders prefer to do all of their programming, specialized software packages like R and Python can be used to develop a strategy that is complex and complete.Of course, there are many traders who would rather trade than program. In this article, we will address those ...Read More

Market analysts often speak of “smart money” and “dumb money.” The exact definitions can vary but individual investors are usually considered to be the dumb money in a market. Smart money is the larger institutional investor or the hedge funds.These labels are intended to segment the market participants based on the information they have available to them. Although there is a great deal of information available to individual investors, institutional investors still hold an information advantage.Large investors tend to pay a high price for their information. They may have Bloomberg terminals that can cost more than $20,000 a year to ...Read More